Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling

The episode opens with some men looking at photos displayed on a screen.

The Village has an outdoor swimming pool.

Number Two has called in "The Colonel" to help with the Prisoner. They discuss a Dr. Seltzman who studied thought transference.

The Village has the device the doctor used to switch minds.

The Prisoner's mind has been put into this man's body. He meets a woman the Prisoner knew. Apparently it's been a year since he's been gone. He worked for the girl's father, and the girl was his fiancee.

He goes (in his "new" body) to see his former employers. They don't seem to believe him though they will have him followed. We also see the hearse from the opening sequence near Number Six's apartment so they are watching him also. Fortunately for him, he has some money he had hidden away.

He had left a paper with his fiancee before he disappeared in case something happened, and now he manages to get her to give it to him.

(One of the interesting problems in some of the episodes is how they are not always careful to have the proper person in the proper scene. This is obviously #6, but it's supposed to be #6 in his "new" body. This type of thing happened a lot in the series.)

A roll of pictures left behind contains information on where to find Seltzman. Number Six needs to find him apparently in order to get the mind transfer process reversed.

He crosses the channel on a ferry and drives to Austria. (Wouldn't it have occurred to him that his car would probably be bugged so he could be followed? That's what was done, of course, and as suspicious as Number Six normally is, it's quite surprising that this didn't occur to him.)

The Village follower catches up to Number Six as he's fighting one of the workers for his former employer.

Here's another example of carelessness in this episode. Notice Seltzman standing by the metal door and the person to his right is Number Six in his "new body," a body which has light brown colored hair. The figure in the picture has very dark colored hair, and a fairly full head of it.

Seltzman transfers the Prisoner's mind back to him, but exchanges minds with the Colonel then escapes in a helicopter with Number Two thinking he really is the colonel. The colonel, now in Seltzman's body, is able to talk to Number Two and then dies. Thus, Number Two knows what happened.

Thus we have another problem with this episode. Even though the helicopter has taken off, Number Two can always warn the helicopter pilot or at least the people where the helicopter is going that something has gone wrong. There would have had to been enough time for the helicopter to get where it was going and for the Colonel/Seltzman to make his escape for the idea to really have worked.

Instead, Number Two finds out almost immediately what happened and he definitely would have been able to stop Seltzman's ultimate escape. The episode would have had to been filmed with some other ending for it to have made actual sense.

I also think The Prisoner would have taken time to write down as much as he could about the Village while he was still in the Colonel's body, and would have left the information with someone who would have gotten it to his former employer.

This is, basically, not my favorite episode.



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